DeWayne Wickham: Morsi's misguided effort in Egypt

DeWayne Wickham

What the events that led to the ouster of Mohammed Morsi make clear is that he cared less about the democracy movement that hoisted him into Egypt's presidency than he did his misguided efforts to replace the country's military dictatorship with a civilian president who ruled by fiat.

For more than half a century, Egypt was led by a succession of presidents culled from the ranks of its omnipotent military. That changed last year when Morsi, an Islamic fundamentalist, won that nation's first democratic election for the presidency of that North African nation.

To be sure, that contest was an imperfect act of democracy. The election commission created by the military to oversee the campaign barred candidates - some of them front-runners - from the race. Egypt's parliament, dominated by religious fundamentalists who were elected a year earlier in the wake of the Arab Spring uprising that chased autocratic President Hosni Mubarak from power, barred anyone who worked for him from seeking the country's presidency.

Once in office, Morsi pulled off a stunning coup of his own. He forced into retirement the top leaders of Egypt's military, replacing the country's longtime defense minister with Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the head of military intelligence. That choice eventually would lead to his undoing.

Three months later, in November 2012, Morsi pulled off another coup of sorts, this time against the basic idea of democratic government. Confronted with a constitutional crisis and street demonstrations, he issued a decree giving himself dictatorial powers and making his decisions immune from judicial review. At the time, an aide explained lamely that this power grab was needed to get Egypt through its rocky transition from military to civilian rule.

With this unfettered authority, Morsi suspended Egyptians' protection against double jeopardy. In an effort to get a harsher sentence, he ordered that Mubarak be retried for his part in the brutal attempt to suppress the demonstrations that led to his ouster. In that trial, Mubarak got a life sentence that left open the possibility of an appeal. Morsi sought to unilaterally block such a legal review.

But, when tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets to challenge his decree, Morsi rescinded much of it - though not before lasting damage was done to the notion that he was the guardian of Egypt's democracy movement. As it turned out, he wasn't.

Morsi's failure to share power with the sizable minority that opposed his presidency sealed his fate. Al-Sisi, a career soldier more loyal to the stability that Egypt's military has long provided the country than the rough and tumble of a fledgling democracy, saw the mounting protests as his way to reassert the military's dominance over Egyptian politics.

In the hours leading up to the coup, al-Sisi met with a broad array of opposition leaders, including Nobel Peace Prize winner and former United Nations diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei; Sheikh Admed el-Tayeb, the country's most prominent Sunni Muslim cleric; and Pope Tawadros II, head of Egypt's Coptic Christians.

I suspect al-Sisi acted more in defense of the military's financial business interests, which extend to virtually every sector of Egypt's economy, than the concerns of these minority groups. The military's holdings are threatened by the country's instability. But, in stripping Morsi of his office, al-Sisi - at least for now - has again made the armed forces the arbiter of the political course Egypt will follow.

And in the tinder box that is the Middle East, a stable, autocratic Egypt is much more desirable there, and in the political chambers of the United States, than the faux democracy that Morsi failed to command.

DeWayne Wickham is a political writer for USA TODAY.

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DeWayne Wickham: Morsi's misguided effort in Egypt

What the events that led to the ouster of Mohammed Morsi make clear is that he cared less about the democracy movement that hoisted him into Egypt's presidency than he did his misguided efforts to